This site has as much to do with hearing people share
who they are, as it does why the poem speaks to them.
Whether you care much for poetry in general is almost
irrelevant, some of these people say they don't either.
Yet "this poem" they may carry always in their
pocket...
You can "hear" that emotional connection and perhaps
the
poem too comes alive in a surprising way. Anyway, I keep
going back to hear a few more, and have selected some
particularly moving ones.
~Gloria

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from the website:
Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate
of the United States, believes that poetry is a vocal
art, an art meant to be read aloud. "If a poem is
written well," he says, "it was written with the poet's
voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead
of saying a poem is like the difference between staring
at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music
on an instrument."

In his over thirty years of teaching, Robert Pinsky has
emphasized the bodily, vocal experience of the art of
poetry. Pinsky, a professor of English and creative
writing at Boston University, long ago found that when
he asks students to read aloud and talk about a poem
they love something remarkable happenssomething in
their faces and voices that demonstrates a profound
personal connection to the poem. The Favorite Poem
Project has grown out of that discovery.

(editor's note: the
following links may no longer be working.)

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/
entire list of 50 short videos

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/scherr.html
Alexander Scherr, Professor of Law - At
the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop

http://www.favoritepoem.org/archive/doherty.html
- John Doherty, construction worker -
from Song of Myself by Whitman

PETROS
from Petros Truth list
What surrender means is that one learns to open oneself
more deeply to the universe, to the world; and that one
suspends ones fears and doubts and resistances to what
'IS.' Gradually one becomes more and more a channel for
the forces of the cosmos, and for the teaching which
expresses those forces in human terms.

Remember wherever you are in space and time you are
always in The Work and The Work will always act on you
according to how you work. It is nothing to do with
anybody or anything or whether you are blamed or not.
Everybody is somewhere in this invisible school and only
where that person can be. No matter how much you feel
you deserve reward or have suffered from The Work or
done your best and all the rest of it - you are
invisibly just where you are in The Work. After a time
you begin to understand this.

Maurice Nicoll

LOU

Well put. Reminds of the chorus from one of my favorite
songs by John Stewart: "All you really had to pay was
the price of the fire."